New Year's Day (1 January)
Easter Sunday and Monday
Ascension Day (40 days after Easter)
Whitsun (seventh Sunday after Easter) and Whit Monday
Labour Day (1 May)
VE Day (8 May)
Bastille Day (14 July)
Assumption Day (15 August)
All Saints' Day (1 November)
Armistice Day (11 November)
Christmas Day (25 December)
Banks, shops, museums and so on are closed for these public holidays. It is not uncommon for Ascension Day and Whitsun/Whit Monday to be in May, meaning four public holidays in this month alone. The French generally take their summer holiday in the first two weeks of August.
French Food and Wine
For a diversity of delicious dishes and wonderful, world-renowned wines, look no further than France. Each region can proudly profess to be able to rustle up a wide variety of culinary delights, be they based around shellfish in Brittany, truffles and foie gras in Dordogne, or olives and aubergines in Provence. Bordeaux, Burgundy and Champagne immediately spring to mind when we think of French wine, but there are several other excellent wine-growing areas such as Alsace, the Loire and Rhône Valleys, Provence, the southwest of France and Languedoc-Roussillon, even Jura and Savoie. All large supermarkets stock a wide range of French wines and there is always a good choice to be found on restaurant menus, but why not sample the local wine if you're cycling past all those vineyards? Look out for roadside signs with the word dégustation (wine tasting) on them. It's not obligatory to buy a bottle after sampling the wine produced by a small cave or château, but it you would be putting money into the local community, even if it's only a few euros. And if one of the bottle cages on your bike frame is empty…
Violet Provençal garlic
If you want to sample and buy some local produce the best place to go is the local market (marché) which usually happens on one particular morning each week. Local traders set up their stalls and sell anything from cheese and meat and fruit to cooking utensils and clothing, but look out for the local speciality foods. There will usually be a van or stall offering hot food, often a regional dish.
Along the Route des Vins d'Alsace (Route 3)
If you are not fortunate enough to be in a village or town on market day, then head for the boulangerie, the baker's shop. Every sizeable village has one selling bread rolls and baguettes, long thin loaves that the French buy daily to accompany their meals. You can also buy sweet breakfast rolls like croissants, brioches and pains au chocolat, as well as cakes, flans, pizza slices and quiches in some boulangerie shops. On Mondays this may well be the only shop open in a village. Buy a baguette or two and then pop over to the charcuterie, which sells cooked meats, pâtés and sausages. Follow this with a visit to the alimentation or épicerie for cheeses and salad (there may even be a fromagerie, a cheese shop, if you are in a larger settlement), and you have all the ingredients for a cheap, delicious picnic at a roadside aire (a grassy or wooded area with picnic tables) after your morning's cycling. Otherwise, lunch can be taken in a village café or brasserie fairly cheaply; the croque monsieur (toasted cheese and ham sandwich) is nearly always on the menu, as is steak haché avec frites (steak and chips), served with salad or vegetables. There is usually a vegetarian dish or two, and crêpes (rolled pancakes with a choice of fillings) may also be on offer. A buckwheat variety of crêpe called galette is very tasty and is particularly popular in Brittany. The plat du jour (dish of the day) or menu touristique are set meals that can be tasty or bland depending on the establishment or the chef's imagination, and usually appear on a restaurant's menu too. If you decide to eat lunch at a restaurant why not be a little more adventurous and choose something with a local twist. Restaurants are only open for lunch or dinner, whereas cafés, brasseries and bars are open all day and will normally serve food throughout the afternoon. If you are running low on water and the shops are shut you can buy bottled water here too, but it won't be cheap.
Supermarkets are plentiful. In towns and villages you will find a Casino, Huit-à-huit or Coccinelle, mini-supermarkets selling fruit, vegetables, salad, tinned food, water, wine, beer, soft drinks and packaged meat slices and cheese. Unlike bigger supermarkets there are no cheese or meat counters, only shelf items. Intermarché and Ecomarché supermarkets are larger and are usually found in the suburbs of towns or on a main road just outside big villages; they have bread, meat and cheese counters that also offer local produce. Some also sell maps, CDs and other such items. Bigger still are the hypermarkets such as LeClerc found on the outskirts of large towns and in cities which sell everything imaginable, most importantly basic bicycle accessories, tools, inner tubes, and so on. Most supermarkets, regardless of size, are open from 8.30am to 12.30pm and 3pm to 7.30pm, Monday to Saturday (although some are not open on Monday mornings, or not at all on Mondays). Many are open on Sundays from 8.30am to 12 noon. Many big supermarkets, on the whole, do not close for lunch.
Small villages may just have an alimentation which caters for all basic needs regarding food and drink. Although most items are a little more expensive than in supermarkets, these tiny shops are very useful when you might be camping in the middle of nowhere, or need to pick up something for lunch on the road. Generally speaking, if a village has a church it will invariably have an alimentation, boulangerie and probably a boucherie (butcher's shop).
Finally, if you have a sweet tooth or are feeling ‘bonky’ (when blood-sugar levels fall too low and you feel weak and wobbly), there's the pâtisserie shop that sells a delicious, colourful array of cakes, flans and tarts. I will never forget feeling bonky once in the Limousin region and finding a pâtisserie open in Bourganeuf – on a Sunday afternoon! Marvellous.
See the maps marking several regional specialities and major wine regions of mainland France in Appendix D. A brief description of each speciality and wine region is also given.
Greg Lemond and Rob Harmeling (TVM/143), Tour de France 1991
The Tour de France
The first Tour de France – the world's greatest bicycle race – took place in 1903. Created by Henri Desgrange, the editor of L'Auto, and George Lefèvre, the rugby and cycling reporter, to help publicise and improve circulation of this sports newspaper, the first event was a six-stage race covering 2428km. The riders left Paris for Lyon, then cycled on to Marseille, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Nantes, and finally back to Paris. The average stage distance was 405km, which meant the competitors had to cycle nights as well as days! They also had to carry out their own repairs if necessary.
Maurice Garin won that first Tour in front of 20,000 Parisiens, and L'Auto's circulation quadrupled, heralding the birth of something very special. Yet the following year's Tour was almost the last, with many riders cheating by catching trains on occasion and even sabotaging each other's bicycles. Fortunately the organisers decided to stage the race again in 1905 with more concrete rules and they introduced the first mountain stage, the Ballon d'Alsace. Desgrange added a stage through the Pyrénées in 1910, and one in the Alps a year later. By now the Tour had more than doubled in overall distance and number of stages, but the average stage distance was still frighteningly long at 356km.
Immediately after World War I Desgrange introduced the yellow jersey (maillot jaune). He chose this colour for two reasons: the roadside spectators could pick out the race leader easily and, perhaps more significantly, L'Auto was printed on yellow paper. Eugene Christophe was the first man to don the yellow jersey on 18 July 1919. The first Italian to win the Tour – previously dominated by the French and Belgians – was Ottavio Bottecchia in 1924. He notched up another victory the following year. The longest-ever